Going Viral Used to Be Fun

It all started with an innocuous tweet.

Shortly after Neil Young declared his intention to remove his music from Spotify over the issue of podcaster Joe Rogan’s vaccine misinformation, Globe and Mail health columnist Andre Picard tweeted a Toronto Star story about how Neil Young had polio as a child. Seeing Picard’s tweet, I quoted it and added a remark of my own: “Two of the greatest popular musicians Canada has ever produced, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, both had polio.”

I didn’t think much about it — it was just a fascinating bit of Canadian musical history that I thought worth sharing. To my surprise the tweet took off. It would eventually rack up over 600 retweets and over 1,800 “faves.” Not an epic event by Twitter standards, where high-profile tweets can earn reactions in the six or even seven figures, but a solid hit nonetheless — viral in more than one sense. The tweet clearly resonated with people who admired Young’s stand, and then got a boost when Mitchell joined him in removing her music from Spotify. Many respondents who popped up in my feed seemed surprised to hear that both Young and Mitchell had suffered from the debilitating ailment that was almost completely eradicated by the polio vaccine.

Then on the following Saturday, something changed. Four days after I posted it, the tweet belatedly seemed to catch the attention of anti-vaxers and Joe Rogan fans. As though a cage door had been opened, my notifications started to fill up with attacks and rebuttals. Soon my feed had become a window into the world of COVID deniers, anti-maskers, anti-vaxers and other subcategories that defy definition.

It was an education. I quickly learned the neologism “convid.” More broadly, a few themes emerged in the Saturday responses, including:

1. The polio vaccine can’t be compared to the COVID vaccines because they are different.
2. The polio vaccine did not actually eradicate polio, which still rages unchecked.
3. Attacking Joe Rogan is censorship.
4. Young and Mitchell are tools of Big Pharma.
5. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell suck. (“Meh,” read one tweet, “Rush is better anyway.”)

“Comparing the MRNA shots to the polio vaccine is like comparing apples to chickens,” read one popular response. An account purporting to be from Australia announced: “I’m on my fourth polio vaccine now and I still have polio.” (Any research scientists reading this may want to contact that fascinating subject.)

The themes cross-pollinated at times. “Kenzie,” an account with six followers, tweeted: “The Covid ‘vaxx’ and the modern polio vaxx developed by The Gates Foundation. The modern polio vaxx actually created a polio epidemic in Africa, and the Covid vaxx isn’t a vaxx.”

(In fact, the oral polio vaccine reduced global cases by an estimated 99.9 per cent, and the only places where polio remains a significant public health issue are countries in which vaccine suspicion became widespread, mainly Pakistan and Afghanistan.)

One aspect of these Twitter exchanges is people arguing with statements you never made. “The fact you compare this vaccine to the polio vaccine shows how little you understand what’s going on,” one response read. “Oh, you’re suggesting that victims of polio have some inoculating insight we should respect as we suffer through our current piffle?” wrote another.

In fact, my tweet made no points or comparisons at all. But in these exchanges the original tweet becomes almost irrelevant — it’s just the bell for another round in a boxing match already in progress.

A bizarre “Take your damn polio and shut up” theme showed up as well. “What do they want, a fucking cookie?” tweeted one account. “Both my mom and my grandma had polio too.”

One tweet attacked Mitchell thusly: “She’s a profiteer. She knows suicidal teen girls buy her music.”

Some people just seemed confused, like the one who posted hashtags including both “#ThankYouJoeRogan” and “#BoycottSpotify.” At one point someone posted a picture of Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly in Back to the Future. That one I can’t decipher. Any insights welcome.

Yet for all the responses, one thing that was largely missing — personal attacks. I do have at least one dedicated Twitter follower who occasionally pipes up to remind me that I am pathetically and consistently unfunny while The Tyee itself is the real joke, etc. But few of the responses to my polio tweet targeted me personally.

This seems at odds with the experiences of many other people on Twitter — in particular, women and people of colour.

Joanna Chiu, author of China Unbound, recently detailed some of her experiences in a Toronto Star article: “I had actually forgotten some threats to my life until I compiled screenshots for a police report recently,” Chiu wrote, “which included a months-old post in which someone implied they were coming over to my home to behead me.”

Chiu has been critical of the Beijing government, which makes her a special target for online harassment — both the Chinese and Russian governments are particularly focused on flaming their critics online and off. But as Chiu points out, the International Center for Journalists found 73 per cent of women journalists had experienced online abuse, while another organization called L1ght clocked a 900 per cent increase in Twitter hate speech directed toward China and individuals of Asian origin during the pandemic.

Star contributor and freelancer Brandi Morin also wrote about the flood of threats and abuse emailed to her after she criticized the truck convoy. My Twitter feed regularly offers examples of other female journalists describing the abuse they take — threats, insults related to personal appearance, in some cases even “doxing,” where online trolls post addresses and phone numbers online.

It’s not only women who are targeted — Global News reporter Keith Baldrey, who is the station’s point man for COVID issues, is among those who have expressed frustration with the steady stream of Twitter trolling. And Globe columnist Gary Mason reports he has been a troll target ever since he was criticized on a recent Tucker Carlson show. But anecdotal evidence shows that women and people of colour frequently deal with a different sort of attack.

In all the responses I got from anti-vaxers, none of them threatened me, called me fat, or asked why I was in this country, despite the fact that I was born in the United States. And that I’m at least 20 pounds heavier than a few years ago.

I probably deserve a few shots. But the important thing is that I have had a few already, namely three doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. It should come as no surprise that I am more inclined to listen to Neil and Joni than the randoms in my social media feeds, and that my desire to go viral does not extend beyond Twitter.